Last week, we were in Market Place. The music was great, starting with Dolly and the Clothespegs, you can look here for a little snippet. It rained mammoth rain so unfortunately The Gherkin riders got a little wet but the streets were full of people listening to music and wandering around to see what else was happening.

Gherkin Fish Bike - before the rains

There was an art market, down the Bristol and West Arcade (thankfully sheltered from the rain) – thank you to all the artists that took part – it was a great day to spend with you all – Bithja Moor, Clemens Stiegleder, David Fairservice, Fabrizio Bicetti, Gerhard Bissell, Ksenija Kronin, Marianne Fowler, Martin Stubbington, Neile Wright and Sue Carson. Links to most of the artists web pages can be found here. We had varying feedback from visitors, some thinking the artists should have more prominent spaces (although we were thankful for cover) and also requests that this should happen more often.

The Art Market

The third element of the art this last weekend was a live art drawing by Mirren Kessling.

Mirren Kessling in action

Here’s a short video of Mirren interviewing the wonderous Amy of Amys Ghost

See you this coming Saturday for art inerventions by Alison Friday, The Outcasts and The River.

Last weekend, we were down at the riverside at The Oracle with Vicky Vergou. Vicky was working with people who were European with English as a second language and she was speaking to them for a project she has been working on for the past 5 years which involves interviewing the participants. We had a good response that day but need more so if you are interested please contact us at jelly.

Here’s a little snapshot from last weekend, of one of our good friends, DJ Dom down at the Riverside.

Last week we were also taking part in the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the Family Resource Centre UK and we are still recovering from the 300+ children who joined us in a junk sculpting project – thankfully we had very few resources left to carry home.

This weekend is the 3rd weekend of the outside:inside festival, we will be in Bristol and West Arcade running an art market, artists include Bithja Moor, Gerhard Bissell, Ksenija Kronin, Martin Stubbington, Marianne Fowler, David Fairservice, Neile Wright and more, at the far end of the Arcade will be an exhibition of some photos from the recent Reading Festival by Tim Redgrove and over at O’Neills in a co-curating project with Reading’s Amy’s Ghost will be Mirren Kessling in a live art performance. Both art events will be running from 12-6pm.

Salvo is story teller and use photography as a mean to engage the viewer in a photographic narrative. Wandering and observing happenings in the street, and generally around is fascinating and never repetitive. A picture of people passing by, going about their business, sitting on a bench or waiting for some friend tells a story. Each picture tells a story and capturing the right moment requires patience and perseverance as people move and don’t repeat their gestures.

I met Salvo through the hang-on where he approached me about his current project.
Salvo’s latest portrait project is underway and the main objective is to focus on people that dedicate themselves to activities motivated by a passion, a personal drive (could be volunteers, artists, activists, entrepreneurs etc). This work will be launched during Volunteers Week – details will be posted on Salvo’s website

Reading based Salvo is using this project to explore the people that work within the local community and delve into what possibly is an aspect of Reading that many people are not aware of, and the opportunity for the viewer to engage into a different aspect of Reading people.

Salvo is also taking part in The Whiteknights Studio Trail, which s celebrating it’s 10th birthday this year. Full information on the trail can be found here

Last weekend I managed to squeeze in a short visit to one of the Caversham Arts Trail venues. This time of year always feels like a rush of studio trails, end of year shows, performances etc and almost every day is taken up by visiting a show. I am going to go back this weekend (the last weekend) to squeeze in as much as possible.

The sight you see before you is presumed to be a result of some sort of cult ceremony that has occurred in this window. We can only speculate on the real meaning and origin of this practise but we can deduce that it involves some being known as ‘OTTER’, since the banner at the back claims, in between the shapes of the triangles, OTTER IS HERE

Pete Montford’s work explores the boundaries between what we think of as fact and fiction. Using myths, folklore, history and the imagination he creates stories and scenarios which confuse that which we usually take as the ‘normal’ and reinvents everyday life for a more exciting twist. The sentence that best sums up his idea is that made by Guy Debord around 50 years ago, which was also the main proposal for the Situationist International, ‘broaden the non-mediocre portion of life, to reduce its empty moments as much as possible’. Pete believes in the setting up of fictional scenarios in an attempt to break down what we think of ‘usual’ and ‘true’ and start developing a way of living life which embraces and even thrives on fiction. He wishes to promote a better way of life through art and fiction.

For this piece of work for the project ‘Open for Art’, Pete is going to create a climate of uncertainty for the viewer, calling upon both real and imagined realities and weaving an image that will cause both visual and conceptual intrigue.